Once into the month of November, the weather breaks. Twilights became prolonged and sad. At dusk, the Berlin sky turned tart and cloudy like new wine. Its color made me lose all sense of living in a city. I would think I was living in uncharted territory, full of swamps and sandbanks, of foggy, desolate spaces. I watched twilight through a huge wood of lofty firs, across bare whitish soil, mottled by puddles of water and battered by wet gusts of wind. At that time of day the rain transported me to a silent, primeval lake district. Perhaps, by nightfall, I would be feeling nostalgic. But what I really felt in my inner self, especially when confronted by such a landscape, was that my principles were melting away like a wax candle, signaling that the inner axis of my upbringing was about to yield. However, this regrettable, individual process meant I succumbed to huge mental lethargy that drastically reduced my spirit of inquiry.
I don’t believe that all these symptoms, he wrote in the last paragraph of the letter, are those associated with the Romantic malady that is sparked by the unattainable evanescence of life. Romanticism is a mixture of truth and deceit transformed into something genuine. They are things that belong to my past — up to a point. The knowledge that my feelings are so insecure is what embitters me. You know how sociable and amenable I can be, particularly if my friends show understanding. However, I could never guarantee that my feelings will remain stable. Where does our sincerity begin and our play-acting end? Do we have it in us to draw a line between one and the other? Do I have it in me? Quite frankly, I don’t think I do. Events in life warp us; language betrays us; feelings deceive us; there are no rigid, one-sided characters: there are multiple truths. This constant instability holds me back, because I experience it in the presence of others and within myself. I am in danger of being sucked into swamps of brazen cynicism or the reverse, of being locked into heartless Puritanism, into the mindless adoration of order. ‘He who would act the angel acts the brute’ — Pascal’s observation is so true. However, I have something on my side: my lack of ambition. If I had any, the horrors aroused in me by ideas in general, the untamed nature of my instincts or my fascination with certain realities, would lead me quite unceremoniously along that path.
In another letter he wrote: There are arguments for the right and arguments for the left. On the other hand, not a single argument exists for staying in the center. But everyone, or almost everyone — I mean those who have no arguments at all — remain mired in this area of lukewarm mediocrity. It’s the one that gives the least headaches when times are calm. ‘In your opinion,’ I asked a Japanese man one day in Berlin, ‘what is man’s driving passion?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘My driving passion is breeding little birds in cages.’ I don’t think I’ll ever be that intelligent. I feel passionate about extremes. Gide’s statement. ‘I’m all about extremes,’ could have been mine. When you embrace an extreme you tend to think morality is a rhetorical exercise — however, despite everything, consolation is only to be found in extremes …
In the end Albert Santaniol spent long periods abroad. Here’s a curious confession I found in a letter dated from Prague: Ideally, I’d like to be a journalist, but not for the totally illusory way that profession confronts you with reality. However, I could never have subjected myself to the pressures of that commercial farce. I’d prefer a journalism that was entertaining, full of blood and guts, and agile enough to imitate reality. I learned a little about life, one summery night in Lyon, watching marionettes in the fair in Perrache. A gentleman in a morning coat, with a large white mustache and bushy, flowing beard — the father — was gazing ecstatically at the sun setting over the waters of the Rhône when his son appeared out of the blue, quietly, on tiptoe, with a wild look in his eyes and a financially desperate appearance, and bludgeoned him on the head with a club. The impact made by that sudden blow … As seen through a journalist’s eye, reality — politics and money are the two sides of reality that most stir their passions and imagination — reads like a train timetable or a minuet directed by a clean-shaven, little old dance teacher who is an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy. We know nothing about anything and yet we remain so stuck in the mud. In order to create good journalism one should be able to draw on the best people in each country — those who have managed to liberate themselves from conventional university thinking or the mediocre ways of the establishment. All journalists do with their apparently precise, restrained, mathematical reporting is to drown everyone in the gluey porridge of drawing-room comedy. The time will come when nobody will have a clear idea of the simplest, most immediate acts. And in a few years, the man who happens to tell it anything like it really is will be condemned out of hand, as if that was the right and proper thing to do. However, I suspect I may be rambling madly. My God, there’s still so much to see, health permitting …
In 1918, we find Santaniol in a pension on Calle Pérez Galdós, previously Colmillo (Tusker) in Madrid. In 1919, he is in Paris; in 1920, in London; in 1921, he’s roaming through the cities of central Europe with lengthy stays in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Prague. He is enchanted by Prague. In the summer, Prague, he wrote me on a postcard, is a golden city against the backdrop of the proudest, most hieratic trees the continental climate can sustain. The old Jewish cemetery is striking in its humble simplicity. In 1922 and ’23 he’s in Italy, first as a tourist, then as vice-consul. Those years saw a considerable reduction in the family income. He had no choice but to buckle down and spend a few hours a day pushing a pen. Then he died when a train went off the rails. It’s not easy to paint the usual superficial, clichéd portrait of him. His papers are scattered all over the place.
In my researches into the life of the deceased, I was amazed to find notes for a possible autobiography — notes he’d never sent, which he gave me to read once, but then no doubt forgot entirely because he never mentioned them again.
Weeks after his death, the family sent me an assignment that had been stipulated by Santaniol himself. He asked me to read through his papers and writing. He spells it out very clearly: If after a reasonable time has elapsed, you think anything could be published, that will depend on you. Personally I would like that to happen but perhaps there is nothing there. I leave it to you as a memento of the friendship we had as students. In the sheaf of drafts they may send you, if I ever disappear, you will find a self-portrait that perhaps corresponds to a particular moment in my existence. Read it. If you think it’s half decent, let it rest for a while — that’s up to you — and if you find any interest out there, then full steam ahead!
All in all, none of these ideas ever went beyond the project stage. I don’t think it has anything to do with a decision taken by his family. I rather believe that things followed the usual pattern: many people in this country attempted in their youth to write, even put their hearts and souls into it and then all of a sudden they dropped it after deciding that their caprice had been a call-to-letters without real substance. A passion for literature often forms part of adolescence and it is generally a phase that’s best forgotten. As I didn’t find anything structured in terms of the projected self-portrait, I have used his correspondence to put together the short record I’ve outlined. It’s very likely that my friend, if he ever breathed again, would have excluded the odd detail that was, in his view, too childish, because years later with the changes that life brings, such childish pranks don’t even interest those involved at the time who now see them as regrettable hiccups from years they’ve had the good fortune to leave behind.